This invention involves a protection sleeve fitting over a person's limb for protection from damaging blows during the play of contact sports.
The participation in a wide variety of sporting activities, generally described as "contact sports", is essentially universal. These sports do not necessarily require intentional physical contact such as in football, wrestling, karate and like sports, but also include sports that involve incidental contact, but nevertheless substantial contact, such as soccer, hockey, basketball, volleyball, field hockey, lacrosse, baseball, and like sports. The group of contact sports that involve intentional contact require pads positioned and located on various parts of the body which receive blows from opposing players. Common football padding now includes not only the shoulder pads, hip pads and like pads that are positioned under the uniform, but now commonly includes elbow pads, forearm pads and even hand pads. The typical football player wants continuous protection from the elbow to the hand but continuous padding unduly restricts movement. Karate pads typically include shin and foot pads used primarily to protect from and deliver blows to the opponent. Wrestling pads include elbow pads and knee pads to protect the participant from damaging blows from the opponent and also from the mat. For the "incidental contact" sports, shin protectors are common to players of baseball. Elbow and knee pads are common for basketball players, particularly if they have suffered an injury to that particular limb. Of course, such limb protectors are common to essentially any sport where there might be incidental contact and the player has suffered a previous injury that requires protection.
Commerically available limb protecting devices are usually constructed of an elastic cloth covering a protection panel constructed of either a flexible resilient polymeric foam pad or a rigid polymeric plastic panel that is conformed to the surface of the limb to be protected. These panels are either flat to cover a small portion of the limb or are curved to shape around a portion of the limb surface. However, if the panel area is large enough to extend around a major portion of the limb, it becomes unduly restrictive and the player cannot enjoy the free movement required to play the sport to his full capacity. This would be particularly true if rigid plastic panels were utilized to surround the protected limb. The size of the panel for protection has to be limited in order to be marketable to a player of these sports. Where 100% effort and performance is encouraged in the participation of the sport, even a slight reduction in the capacity of the player to move is critical.
These contact sports are played not only by professional athletics and essentially full grown individuals, but also by children who are still growing to their ultimate size and strength. Needless to say, the protection pads that are necessary for the professional player are even more important for the youngster to prevent serious or possibly even crippling injury. Since the circumference of the limbs of a child is much smaller, restriction of movement by a too large protection pad is an even more serious problem.
None of the prior art devices either in the literature or in commerical usage satisfy this need to provide the combination of protection and freedom of movement nor attain the objects provided herein below.